Unfortunately for them, however, Michael Larson, an Ohio ice-cream truck driver with a proclivity for get-rich quick schemes, took both the time and energy to do so. But at the time, CBS and Bill Carruthers, the show’s creator, felt that the handful of sequences would represent a sufficiently complex and random pattern that contestants could not decipher it. A technological marvel for its day, the board’s computing power proved primitive by twenty-first-century standards. When CBS, which broadcast “Press Your Luck,” first premiered the game, it only used a handful of computer-generated sequences to randomize the indicator on the game board that the contestant stopped to determine the prize he or she would receive-or, on an average of one in six spins, a Whammy. With each spin, contestants would either win the cash or prize they landed on, or, in the case of a Whammy, lose their winnings to that point. Players answered questions to earn spins, which each gave a contestant one chance to control the game board. “Press Your Luck,” which premiered in September 1983, featured players taking turns at a game board filled with various cash amounts, prizes, and the dreaded “Whammy”-which, when landed upon, took away all a player’s money. As with a blackjack expert at counting cards who takes a casino to the proverbial cleaners, his actions neither violated the law, nor any standards that would warrant the ignominy that the “scandal” moniker connotes. On “Press Your Luck,” the contestant in question merely used knowledge of the game to increase his odds of winning.
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December 2022
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